[QScintilla] Call tip problem

[Paul Kerchen]

> From: Phil Thompson [mailto:phil at riverbankcomputing.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 5:07 AM
> 
> The short answer is that I don't know if such a change would 
> cause problems elsewhere - try it and see.
> 
> It's very difficult to get auto-completion and call tips 
> right (ie. quick, fast and useful) and, to a certain extent, 
> I've given up trying. Instead I'm happy to open up the API to 
> make it easier for people to replace bits of the 
> functionality with their own implementations. For example, 
> QScintilla v2.3 allows you to change the way APIs are stored.
> 
> If you found that changing contextWords() works for you, but 
> might break things for others, then I'd consider making 
> contextWords() (or something like it) public and virtual.
> 

Hi Phil,
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm quickly coming to appreciate why you've given
up trying to make auto-completion and call tips right for everyone all the
time. :)

I created a new lexer that inherits from QsciLexerJavaScript.  The only
differences between my lexer and its base class are in
autoCompletionWordSeparators() (added ")." and "]." ) and wordCharacters()
(added '(',')','[' and ']'). That new lexer got me a lot closer to where I
would like to be, being able to handle significantly more complicated
expressions without any trouble.  However, there are still some expressions
that don't make it past contextWords() (for example, the double in the
expression "foo.bar(3.14).boom()" makes contextWords() give up).  I don't
know how these changes affect other parts of Qscintilla since I'm bypassing
some of its functionality anyway (I don't use the "automatic"
auto-completion functionality--I use user lists instead--and I'm explicitly
calling callTip() when necessary), but of course adding my own custom lexer
doesn't affect anyone but me. ;)  However, being able to make a more
specialized version of contextWords() would be useful for me, so I would
vote in favor of making it public and virtual.

Paul